The Franco Prussian War

In 1870 Bismarck ordered the Prussian Army to invade France, inciting one of the most dramatic conflicts in European history. It transformed not only the states-system of the Continent but the whole climate of European moral and political thought. The overwhelming triumph of German military might, evoking general admiration and imitation, introduced an era of power politics, which was to reach its disastrous climax in 1914. First published in 1961 and now with a new introduction, The Franco-Prussian War is acknowledged as the definitive history of one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts in the history of Europe.

Wawro describes the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1, that violently changed the course of European history.

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.

The first comprehensive history of the Fall Campaign that determined control of Central Europe following Napoleon's catastrophic defeat in Russia.

“Masterfully written . . . This series provides the enthusiast and historian with volumes in which history is combined with tourism on the battlefields.” —On the Old Barbed Wire In 1870 France embarked on a war with Prussia and her allied German states that was to be a complete disaster. For Napoleon III, after his ignominious surrender with thousands of his troops from the Army of the Rhine and the Army of Châlons, it meant his abdication and exile. For France it resulted in the humiliation of her army, a bitter civil war in Paris, the loss of two Provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) and a heavy indemnity. Maarten Otte provides background chapters to place the lead up to the war and the issues that were involved; he describes the makeup of the opposing armies and some of their principal commanders. The Sedan Campaign was fought over a relatively small area and the locations of some of the key battles have changed little, though some of those near the built-up areas, such as Sedan itself, require some imagination. After the war several German regiments erected monuments and a surprising number remain today, often hidden away in isolated fields and copses. Several communal cemeteries have a number of German graves. Perhaps one of the most macabre of these is the ossuary in Bazeilles, where the visitor is able to see skeletons that still have shreds of uniform and footwear on them. Sedan was also a focus of the most recent and bloody western European wars, and a notable feature of this battlefield is to see memorials to the conflicts of the twentieth century—the Great War and the Second World War.

At a time when Napoleon needed all his forces to reassert French dominance in Central Europe, why did he fixate on the Prussian capital of Berlin? Instead of concentrating his forces for a decisive showdown with the enemy, he repeatedly detached large numbers of troops, under ineffective commanders, toward the capture of Berlin. In Napoleon and Berlin, Michael V. Leggiere explores Napoleon’s almost obsessive desire to capture Berlin and how this strategy ultimately lost him all of Germany. Napoleon’s motives have remained a subject of controversy from his own day until ours. He may have hoped to deliver a tremendous blow to Prussia’s war-making capacity and morale. Ironically, the heavy losses and strategic reverses sustained by the French left Napoleon’s Grande Armee vulnerable to an Allied coalition that eventually drove Napoleon from Central Europe forever.

The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 when Bismarck engineered a war with the French Second Empire under Napoleon III. This was part of his wider political strategy of uniting Prussia with the southern German states, excluding Austria. The war was an overwhelming Prussian victory, and King Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of the new united Germany. The Second Empire collapsed and Napoleon III became an exile in Britain. In the peace settlement with the French Third Republic in 1871 Germany gained the eastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, areas that were to provide a bone of contention for years to come.